Gyroscopes are devices that measure angular rate of movement, which is useful for many applications including dynamic vehicle control, gesture recognition, and navigation, etc. Gyroscope-based systems are currently used in many fields including aerospace navigation, industrial machine monitoring, automobile electronic stability control, handheld devices, etc.
Key measures of gyroscope performance are sensitivity, bandwidth and stability (or bias drift). The highest performance currently can cost up to $1,000,000, are frequently based on optics, and exhibit drift as low as a few degrees/h or better. On the other end of the spectrum, consumer-grade gyroscopes currently cost about $1 per axis, are based on Microelectromechanical systems (MEMS) technologies and suffer from a much higher drift, for example, in the range of 50-100 degrees/h.
For personal navigation, three-axis gyroscopes having drift in the single degrees/h range while maintaining the sensitivity and bandwidth to comprehend both slow and fast angular rotations are desirable. This is fundamentally unattainable using known electrostatic MEMS gyroscopes.